Managing The Project Cycle

1. The assessment and planning phase 1.1 Training your staff in Project Cycle thinking 1.2 Identifying the real problems and needs 1.3 Stakeholder analysis 1.4 Problem analysis 1.5 Project planning and design 1.6 Strategic planning 1.7 Defining indicators 1.8 The action plan 1.9 The budget 1.10 Addressing the risk of a negative outcome 2. The implementation and monitoring phase 2.1 Monitoring 2.2 Participatory Impact Assessment 2.3 Distributing information 3. The evaluation phase 3.1 Purposes of evaluation 3.2 Participatory evaluation 4. The adaptation phase 4.1 Feeding lessons learnt back into the planning

MANAGING THE PROJECT CYCLE Amsterdam May 2009 www.networklearning.org

MANAGING THE PROJECT CYCLE

The Project Cycle an overview

The project cycle consists of four stages: assessment and planning, implementation and monitoring, evaluation, and adaptation. Each stage has its own characteristics and requires specific knowledge and skills.
A Project Cycle Diagram
ASSESSMENT & PLANNING

ADAPTATION

IMPLEMENTATION & MONITORING

EVALUATION

The assessment phase is sometimes also called the identification phase, as in this period the why? of the project is the important question to ask. In this stage the real problems and issues that need to be addressed, are identified. The assessment phase is followed by a planning phase in which goals and objectives are defined and the feasibility of the project is carefully researched. Then an action plan is made, resources are determined and the use of the resources is planned. At this stage it is already important to think about and identify indicators to be used to monitor and to evaluate the project. In the implementation phase, during which the project is actually carried out, continuous monitoring needs to take place, in order to watch whether the project is on the right track, is meeting its objectives and is using its resources as planned. During the evaluation phase the project is measured against its objectives, both to see if objectives have been met, but also to see how this was done and what the impact of the project is. In other words what changes have occurred as a result of project activities? On the basis of the evaluation, adaptation of the project can take place and lessons learnt can be identified and used for future planning. The project cycle is a continuously ongoing one; after evaluation and adaptation, the planning starts again, followed by implementation etc.

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Project Cycle Management (PCM) Project cycle management is the term given to the process of planning and managing projects, programmes and organisations. In order to make development projects successful, good planning is needed. Some important factors need to be taken into account, in particular the needs and views of stakeholders. Stakeholders is the word currently used for everybody with an interest in the project. Stakeholders may include clients, target groups, beneficiaries the people who, it is hoped, will be helped by the project, but may also include local leaders, the community, NGO workers, and donors. So to focus on the group helped, the phrase Primary Stakeholders is used in this document. PCM ensures that all aspects of projects are considered. Each part of the project cycle is considered in the management process and changes in all parts are noticed and taken into account for future project planning and design. This way of working could contribute to the success and sustainability of the project.

1. The assessment and planning phase

During the assessment and planning phase you will: Identify the real problems and issues that will need to be addressed, through collecting information; Consider the feasibility of a project; Set your goals and objectives; Develop an action plan; Carefully plan the use of your resources; Identify indicators for monitoring and evaluation.

Many organisations at this stage use the logical framework. Information on what the logical framework is exactly and how to use it can be found in:

Tearfunds Project Cycle Management tools:

http://tilz.tearfund.org/Publications/ROOTS/Project+cycle+management.htm

EuropeAids Project Cycle Management Handbook:

http://www.stgm.org.tr/docs/1123450143PCM_Train_Handbook_ENMarch2002.pdf [direct link to 3Mb PDF].

1.1 Training your staff in Project Cycle thinking; If your NGO staff is not accustomed to using the Project Cycle as a management tool, consider using Networklearnings teaching module (http://www.networklearning.org/library/task,cat_view/gid,50/). It is designed to get them thinking in cycles. The example used in the module is drawn from a specific field - constructing housing after a disaster - but you can bring your own fields of expertise in, to ensure that people are applying what they are learning. Tearfund (www.tearfund.org) offers a set of Project Cycle Management tools [see link above] that can be used for planning programmes and managing and developing

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organisations. Their planning section starts with: There is a phrase: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Think of examples of when things have gone wrong because planning was not carried out adequately. Why did things go wrong? What was not taken account of? 1.2. Identifying the real problems and needs The first steps of the Project cycle involve identifying the real problems and needs. What needs or problems exist and whom do they affect? Which strengths and weaknesses do different affected people have to address their problems? What can they do themselves? You may already have a lot of information, and may already have a good idea of what you want to do. However this information might be less complete than you realise. An exercise in actively gathering information may bring in an extra dimension. Accurate, reliable and sufficient information is necessary in order to: - Plan effectively and efficiently; - Be aware of all factors and circumstances that can influence the project, such as the context in which the project will take place; - Understand causes of problems or issues; - Know what others are doing already in order to avoid duplication and see where cooperation is needed; - To define the most appropriate way to respond to a need or address a problem; - To justify your input and use of resources. 1.3 Stakeholder analysis A first step in the identification of problems and needs is the stakeholder analysis. Stakeholders are those who directly or indirectly become involved in deciding what a project or programme should achieve and how it should be achieved. They may involve beneficiaries, project or program staff and management at local, regional, national or international levels, researchers, government agencies and donors. Effective and efficient project cycle management requires a participatory approach, involving all stakeholders, in all project cycle phases and especially in decisionmaking. A truly participatory approach will strengthen responsiveness and provide a sense of ownership, which will contribute to the likelihood of achieving the projects objectives. When people become committed this contributes to sustainability. Using local knowledge and skills might strengthen efficiency and avoid mistakes. When stakeholders are given sufficient information and decision-making power, then transparency and accountability improves as people are informed about what and why, and have a specific responsibility in the project. Knowing who your stakeholders are and having an idea of the existing problems leads to the next question: what information do you need exactly, from whom and how will you gather it? A Needs Assessment or a PRA might be the right tool.

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Use Networklearnings Information its collection and use through the

Project Cycle to help you:
http://www.networklearning.org/library/task,cat_view/gid,44/

Focus Group Discussions

(http://www.networklearning.org/library/task,cat_view/gid,69/) may be one of the tools used to gather information.

A Needs Assessment is often seen as a separate activity, when a team from the NGO and other disciplines goes and spends a week with the primary stakeholders. But some NGOs plan ahead. If the primary stakeholders are nearby, living in shantytowns or in a refugee camp, you may have already built information collection into routine NGO activities, with perhaps a pair of workers spending an afternoon a week visiting a few families or individuals and gathering information in an organised way. In such a case your NGO will already have good information on which to base future planning and decisions. Other sources of information can be experts from outside your NGO and people who are primary stakeholders and make sure that what they say is taken seriously. No NGO has complete expertise. Needs Assessments can be done in partnership with other experts. These may be people working in Government offices or private enterprises. If you are concerned with poverty, you might want to involve an expert on micro-enterprises from a bank; if you are interested in health and sickness, you can talk to the local health workers. Building partnerships with such people is worth doing. Most groups of primary stakeholders can play an active part in the process of finding out what the problems are. Children over seven, people with psychiatric problems, the elderly, even people with special education needs (the people previously called 'mentally handicapped') may still be able to communicate if you say to them in a careful and respectful way, What are your problems?- What kind of place do you want to live in and why? they will have a point of view worth hearing. It is important to assess needs based on a gender needs assessment see Networklearnings checklist Gender Issues in the Project Cycle (http://www.networklearning.org/library/task,cat_view/gid,43/) As men and women have different tasks, they also have different needs. Child bearing requires natal care and access to specific health services. Being the head of the household requires the skills and means to provide sufficient income. Needs could be divided into practical and strategic ones. Practical needs could be water provision, health care, provision of agricultural tools or income earning for household purposes. These needs are mostly connected to the reproductive and productive work and to the specific tasks of women and men. Responding to these needs will solve practical problems but mostly will not change anything in power relations, control over resources or decision-making power. For example: the community may feel that that they have a serious problem with malnutrition in the small children and have ideas of improving the situation by growing vegetables

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Looking at strategic needs means looking at power relations, access to and control over resources, and decision-making rights. For example strategic needs could be access to credit and other resources; measures against violence; freedom of decision-making; and the rights to own land or property. Responding to strategic needs will influence and hopefully change real issues about power, decision-making and access to and control over resources. For example: a change in the law so that women can own property would change who has control over the land. The creation of a cooperative might empower men, women or both to obtain better prices for crops. 1.4 Problem analysis Once needs and problems have been identified, then the next step is to analyse them. No problem exists by itself; it is always part of a cause-and-effect chain of problems and these causes and effects have to be identified in order to plan well. An exercise often used is to draw the problem tree, from which project objectives can be derived. This exercise is described in Tearfunds Project Cycle Management tools and in chapter 4.1 of EuropeAids Project Cycle Management Handbook [see p. 3]. Problem trees enable stakeholders to get to the root of their needs and problems, to investigate the effects of problems, to think about ways to address these problems and to define priorities. 1.5 Project planning and design The next steps of the Project Cycle involve deciding what the project should do and then planning how to bring these changes about. To ensure that you get to where you want to go to, pick goals, objectives and indicators that together reflect the vision of your NGO. A goal is the general purpose of the project, for example to decrease malnutrition of small children or to improve the clean water availability in a village. Based on your needs assessment and problem analysis you can define the objectives of the project. This continues on from the problem tree exercise; objectives are identified and organised in direct relation to the problems. The exercise involves reformulating problems into objectives (see the links given above for guidance and advice).Which changes are desired? Objectives are desired future situations, they are not activities. Writing an objective is often simply a matter of turning a problem statement around. An example of a problem statement is that farmers have no access to information on the prices of their agricultural products. An objective then is that these farmers have access to that information. Objectives are also specific, measurable results to be achieved by a specific point in time. They need to be realistic and feasible. Each will require resources, financial, human or other, and these must be available or possible to acquire. Here are three objectives Two are long-term:

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In three years time, 75% of the families in the project community will have vegetable gardens. In three years time the Under-5 children will be eating more vegetables

One is short-term: By October every family will have access to seeds, fertiliser and tools at an affordable price Ask yourself whether these three objectives are relevant, feasible (do-able) and measurable. Now, in order to reach each objective, you need to define how you are going to do it and that is a strategy. 1.6 Strategic planning After the analysis, you have decided what you want to change or what needs to be changed. But how are you going to bring about these changes? What is needed? The process of planning how you will make it happen is called strategic planning. Sometimes several problems need to be addressed at the same time, which means that you will have to develop more projects. Each project needs to be assessed in terms of the expertise required, length of time needed to put it in place, type of budget requirement and which stakeholders are involved. Smaller, simple projects will be easier to handle than large and complex ones. To appraise strategy options, EuropeAids Project Cycle Management Handbook [see p. 3] advises to use the following key questions: - What is likely to solve the problem? - Can the key problem be solved by one or two projects or is it necessary to put in place a parallel set of projects all focusing on the key problem? - Do the problems and objectives match? - What resources are available? - What can potential implementing agencies do? - What other projects or initiatives are planned or being implemented? - If the project is successful, can it be mainstreamed? 1.7 Defining indicators In order to measure the impact of your project (impact indicators), to monitor the process, and to know in how far the objectives have been met (process-indicators), indicators are needed. These indicators are a type of measurement agreed upon beforehand in the planning stage. They are used to see in how far objectives have been reached. There are several requirements for good indicators. An indicator has to be: - Relevant to the objective it is measuring. If, for example, the objective is that children will eat more tomatoes, the indicator to increase the number of families growing tomatoes, is not a relevant indicator, because it says nothing about the tomatoes being eaten by the children.

- Measurable: can the indicator realistically be measured?

For example: how could you measure more children will be well nourished.

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Can you use existing Road to Health cards that measure weight for age?

- Sufficient: is one indicator sufficient or are more indicators needed in order to

measure in how far the objective has been met? An example might be the objective to improve the sanitation in the village. Which indicators would you need to measure this?

- Achievable. What to think of the indicator in one year time there will be no
more malnutrition in the village? Is this achievable? An example of an achievable indicator: in three years time, the percentage of malnourished children will be reduced by 7% if you define malnutrition using the percentiles on the Road to Health. Specific: quality, quantity and time need to be specified. How good, how much (for example 50%), in which period? Allow for changes if something changes in the project. It should be possible to adapt the indicator if changes occur. Cost-effective: the resources, human, financial and other, needed in order to measure the indicators should be reasonable and in ratio to the project costs Available: to measure income in times that no crops are sold, might not be possible.

Preferably, indicators should be developed in a participatory way, which also could involve participatory assessment later on. Use of participatory methods will keep people feel involved and could contribute to measure the real impact of a project on the lives of the project (primary) stakeholders.

For more information see also Participatory Impact Assessment

pact_10_21_08.pdf?version=1 [direct link to 3Mb PDF]

(https://wikis.uit.tufts.edu/confluence/download/attachments/10979253/Part_Im For example: you can measure the nutritional status of under fives with the women of the community, literate and non-literate. They can learn to measure Upper Arm Circumference with the standard coloured tape measures. Normally they are divided into pairs with at least one of each pair able to use a tally sheet. Then both women measure each child. If they come up with different results then the supervisor does a third measurement. If they agree, the finding is accepted. By measuring malnutrition, the women learn to recognise it.

Step one is to identify the indicators. Step 2 is to decide how you will measure these indicators. How will you collect your information? You would have to think about the following: - Which methods will you use for information gathering? - How often do you need to collect information? When?

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What will be your sample size to get the information? How to select your sample? Who will be responsible for the information collection, data processing, analyzing and reporting? What is needed? Cost, time, human and material resources? What will be the means of communication and reporting? How will the reporting be done? How often? Storing data: how and where will you store your data? In a written form, on CDs, computers? Who will be responsible for the follow up? For adaptations of the project if necessary? For example: One of your indicators is that In three years time, 75% of the families in the project community will have vegetable gardens and use these vegetables in the family diet. During the development of the project, everyone agreed who would do the routine monitoring - members of the Health Committee. You want them to monitor whether the project is making progress and it is agreed that they will do this every two months, with a sit-down review in June 2010. You will also decide who will be responsible for support visits to the community, collecting the raw data, processing and analyzing it, how this will be done and who will be responsible for the follow up.

In general how much information you can gather and the method you will use are determined by the resources and time you have available. For example: consultation with primary stakeholders is time-consuming but does not need technical facilities. Collecting a lot of quantitative information is also time consuming and might need a data-analysing computer program. Will you develop special tally sheets for literate and non-literate committee members? Will you write the results in your quarterly report? Or summarize it in your database? Or open a specific database sheet for this information? How will you feed the findings back to the different stakeholders? Which donor(s) needs to be informed? If the result is disappointing, who will be responsible for taking action? Specifying and planning the monitoring and evaluation in this preparatory stage will facilitate the actual monitoring and evaluation later on. For more details on monitoring and evaluation see below. 1.8 Action plan From the objectives and strategies the action plan can be shaped, materialized. When the objectives have been clearly formulated, the next step is to turn the objectives into an action plan. An action plan consists of several elements: - Activities: Which activities need to be undertaken in order to reach the objectives? When, where, by whom? - Required input: What do we need? Human resources? Financial, physical, material resources? Time? - Expected output: What do we expect to achieve? What will be the result of the specific activities and inputs in the course of the project?

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Indicators (see above) Evidence: how can you prove that the measurement of the indicator is true? For example how would you prove that more vegetables are used in the family diet? Expected effect: what effect will the action or activity have on the (primary) stakeholders? Assumptions: These are factors that are important for the project, but which are outside its scope. Assumptions are the answer to the question What external factors are not influenced by the NGOs activities, but may affect its plans? Examples are the political environment, the amount of rain in the monsoon, conflict situations or world prices for fertiliser. Precondition. A precondition is the first and most important assumption you define. The precondition is usually a policy that needs to be in place, or an agreement by a major contributor to your project. If the precondition is not met at the on-start of your project, your level of risk is high. For example: if you want to start a programme for which you will need improved seeds, the cooperation of the department of agriculture might be essential in order to get access to these seeds.

An action plan needs a time line. When will you conduct certain activities? When will you expect results? When will you measure the expected effects? And how gender friendly is the project planning? Will the project contribute to gender equity? Are needs of both men and women met (if applicable)? 1.9 The budget Now you know what you want to do and how you want to do it. The next step is to prepare a budget, which is needed for transparent financial management, planning and monitoring. Maybe you already have money; otherwise you will have to approach donors and write a proposal. The budget has to be established considering all the materials, activities and resources needed in order to carry out the project. The budget (see http://www.mango.org.uk/guide/files/budgeting-v2.doc [direct link to DOC]) has to be realistic, using actual and reasonable prices and amounts, which might convince the donor to fund the project and ensure that the project can be implemented as planned. Mango's training manual, Practical Financial Management for NGOs (http://www.mango.org.uk/guide/resources/manual.aspx) explains all the key concepts of basic NGO financial management, including preparing a budget. 1.10 Assessing the risk of a negative outcome Some people consider that this is an important exercise towards the end of the planning stage. Sometimes it is also called a quality assurance check. The aim is to step back from the planned project and think about all the possible ways that it could go wrong; then with each identified possible problem, the team can consider whether they have the flexibility and resources to adapt. Items to consider are: The technology. How acceptable is the technology? For how long will the technology be affordable? For how long will the technology be functional? Will there be money for maintenance?

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The primary stakeholders. Who do you hope to reach? What do you expect of the primary stakeholders? Who will not be reached and how will they react? Your technology always costs the user something time, money. Where would the resources have gone to if the project did not happen? The personnel. Are you training personnel? What will happen to them at the end of the project? Do they expect a career? Will they continue to need supervision? What could go wrong if they are unsupervised? The timescale. Of the plan, the money and the people. What could go wrong if they do not match? Do the activities match the objectives? Does each of the objectives have clear indicators? Are objectives and activities gender-friendly?

2. The Implementation and Monitoring Phase

The implementation phase is the period in which the project is actually conducted and the planned activities are carried out. This also implies that a continuous monitoring is necessary to keep up the quality of the work that is going on, to ensure that the project is heading in the right direction, that progress is made towards the objectives and problems are spotted early. In this phase it is important regularly to reassess the risks of the projects and to check if the stakeholders remain the same. The results and learning from the monitoring has to be fed back into the project design and adjustments or improvements where necessary have to be made. In practice nothing will go completely as planned and few plans are carried out within the estimated time. Management need a good flow of believable information to do these two tasks and a large measure of flexibility. Problems will always arise. Consider how you will respond if - Supplies are held up for at least a month; - You are told that half the workers are reporting faked data; - The Community is angry because they think they are being exploited; - The Community has stopped doing what it promised. Make your own list of what might go wrong and how you would respond. 2.1 Monitoring The process of change needs continuous monitoring and evaluation. You need to check if you are on the right road or if you have taken a wrong turn. If the results are not what you expected, things may go slowly, people lose motivation and action must be taken. A change process is like a child learning how to walk: falling and getting up again. Do not get discouraged, enjoy the positive outcomes and adapt your strategies on the negative ones. Monitoring is essential in a changing situation. The purpose of monitoring is to find out whether the program and activities are effective, and how strategies need to be adapted to ensure the best possible results. Simply put: we made a plan; now, are we carrying it out, in good time and using the right means, people and approaches?

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Monitoring is a continuous process for the duration of the project. It is an activity based on data collection. The knowledge and skills required for monitoring are the same as for assessment and analysis. In fact your monitoring has been planned beforehand by defining indicators and how to collect information on these indicators. It is important that this has been done with all your stakeholders involved. Sometimes the NGO has a clear idea of what is important and a core principle but if a donor thinks differently you may need evidence to convince them. For example: A small hospital in East Africa was proud of the way they had informed and educated the women of the district and how the women used the services, made good choices and felt more empowered. But the INGO funding the hospital organised an evaluation from Europe with little consultation. Two male doctors came out with a Terms of Reference that saw cost-effectiveness as the output most desired while the gender empowerment aspects were ignored completely. The result was that nobody was happy and the funding was cut. 2.2 Participatory Impact Assessment (PIA) Nowadays the focus of NGOs is on Participatory Impact Assessment (PIA), which is an extension of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). PIA involves the adaptation of participatory tools, combined with more conventional statistical approaches, specifically to measure the impact of humanitarian assistance and development projects on peoples lives. The approach acknowledges local people or project clients as experts by emphasizing the involvement of project participants and community members in assessing project impact and recognizes them as experts to indicate changes. In contrast to many traditional project monitoring and evaluation approaches, PIA aims to measure the real impact of a project on the lives of the project participants. Most evaluations tend to focus on measuring aspects of project implementation, such as the delivery of inputs and services, the number of water points constructed or the number of people trained. As far as possible, a PIA should use indicators that are identified by the community or intended project participants. Communities have their own priorities for improving their lives, and their own ways of identifying impact indicators and measuring change. Oftentimes these priorities and indicators are different from those identified by external actors. Consistent with this, a project level PIA tries to answer the following three key questions: - What changes have there been in the community since the start of the project? - Which of these changes are attributable to the project? - What differences have these changes made to peoples lives? More details on PIA and methods to use can be found in: Participatory Impact Assessment [see page 8].

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Regularly updated information is vital in ensuring that programs remain relevant and effective. Regular monitoring allows managers to determine priorities, identify emerging problems, determine the effect of their responses, and guide revisions to their programmes. Regularly updated information means that questions can be asked that have more to do with evaluation whether, for example the programme is really going to affect the problem addressed. Information derived from continual monitoring of programmes can be used for reviews, evaluations and other purposes. Monitoring looks complex but should not be. It helps to use a monitoring system adapted to your needs and situation and specified in the preparation phase of the project. Some projects are easier to monitor than others. If you are vaccinating children, you count the kids and calculate the proportion of all children covered and not covered. Changes in attitudes or behaviour are more difficult to monitor, but the use of good indicators from the very beginning will facilitate this process. Some additional aspects to think about: - Information collected should be directly relevant to the programme in other words, it should be useful and acted upon. It should also be documented; action should be taken to make it available as needed to other sectors and agencies, and to the affected population. - The means of communication used (dissemination methods, language, etc., must be appropriate and accessible for the intended audience. A report to your donor needs to be in an official form. But information provided to your non-literate stakeholders should be in a form they will understand. In some cases you might decide to have a workshop to present the results, discuss the outcomes, and talk about the next steps. 2.3 Distributing information Try to keep to information minimal but key, from important areas, considering who needs to know what. What does the field staff and the community need to know, what is important for the director to know? For example: The director might in the sowing season want to know how many families have hoed and planted seeds. He or she does not need to know the names, dates etc. The project support officer needs a record of contact with the Committee members, and should also be holding a running discussion of what is going right and why, where the problems are and why. Varieties of communication forms are needed. These could be verbal, written, formal or informal. Tally sheets can be filled in by non-literates (see Networklearnings Information its collection and use through the Project Cycle [link on page 4]). Photographs are always handy to show people what really happened, especially when they show the situation before and after for example uncultivated bush versus cultivated garden. Or a photograph of training. Make sure that you can crosscheck information to gather evidence and pass the right information in the right way to the right person. For example: you receive a verbal message that the well and water pump in one village have been repaired and the pump is now working well. Your

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crosscheck method will be that you (or someone else) go to the village and observe if the well is indeed working properly. Monitoring can teach you what went well, which was a right method to use, which not, why not. Have the right resources been used? Was the amount of money spent in relation to the outcome? Were participatory methods used and do people now feel involved? For example: the community might decide to monitor whether the vegetable gardens have been dug out and fenced and whether seeds were available at the time and price agreed. Later, after complaints, they add to their list what the stakeholders think about: the variety of seeds, the taste of the vegetables and any other comments or suggestions. When you discover, by good monitoring, that something does not work, you are obliged to act. For example: one of the new seeds is doing badly, which means you have to take action to ensure that the project agronomist finds out why and passes good advice via the Committee people doing the monitoring. And s/he needs to act quickly so that other crops can fill the gap. Monitoring often overlaps with evaluation. Some means that can be used for monitoring and evaluation are: - Discussing and exchanging information with partners and stakeholders; - Writing reports; - Using computers for analysis (spreadsheets, databases, statistics, graphics, or combined programmes); - Using diagrams, matrices, graphics, mapping etc; - Using video, photos; - Using observation. You can write your monitor plan in a matrix. Have a look at your action plan, decide what you have to monitor, how and by whom. Use the indicators from your action plan to see if youre on the right road. Example matrix for monitoring
Subject/ action Indicators Method of data collection Who Frequency of data collection Reporting system Analysis by whom Redesign or adaptation by whom

. Depending on the findings, you may have to re-visit your objectives and strategies and adapt your action plan.

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3. The evaluation phase

Evaluation is often the last part of a project or process but at the same time the beginning of the next phase, extension or new proposal. Three evaluation moments can be distinguished: - Mid-term often mixed with monitoring and sometimes called an assessment; - Immediately after the completion of the projects; - Some time after the completion of the project. Staff of the organisation can do an internal evaluation. An independent outside agency can perform an external evaluation, often at the request of the donor. An evaluation can also be a joint one with staff from the organisation and personnel from the outside agency. The organisation itself can also clearly indicate what they think is important to evaluate and should certainly be involved in defining the Terms of Reference. Read again the story of the hospital three pages back. A real participatory evaluation will involve the primary stakeholders as well. 3.1 Purposes of evaluation The purpose of the evaluation can be twofold: to assess the actual results of an activity and/or to assess what has been learnt from the project. A difference can be made in types of evaluation, like process evaluation, where you look at the process during the project and impact evaluation, where you look at the impact of the project on the primary stakeholders. A distinction is also made between formative and summative evaluation. This distinction is related to the perspective from which an evaluation is conducted. Formative stems from the public accountability perspective and summative from the improvement perspective. The following could be examined during a formative evaluation: - Effectiveness: To what extent have the objectives been achieved? And at what costs? If objectives were not met, then why? Strategies and action used: Which were the strengths in the strategies/ actions? Which the weak points? Are objectives still valid - or do these need to be adapted? Which changes need to be made in order to reach the objectives? All these questions reflect the project management and planning. - Efficiency: Are the costs in proportion to the benefits? These costs refer to resources: human resources, time, energy, money and materials. If, for example, a lot of women/men hours were needed to cultivate the gardens, and fertiliser had to be imported and was extremely costly, the balance between input and output might not be correct. Or suppose a lot of time, effort and money was spent on vegetables but the farmers are making the harvest into alcohol this project could be a waste of money. Impact analysis: What has been the impact on the staff, the organization and the stakeholders? What changes have been brought about by the project?

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These changes can be the ones desired, but sometimes, unexpected ones occur: A participatory impact analysis can be used to understand the stakeholders perspectives. Example; a Hygiene Education project linked to newly installed pumps and vegetable growing was very concerned with helping women get control of their home situation; they monitored the process of the project and during the end evaluation they used tools drawn from Participatory Impact Analysis. Their findings were that women felt more empowered but also reported less diarrhoea among the children. The improvement-oriented evaluation could focus on: - What went well and what not? Why? What improvements are needed in order to be more effective, more efficient or to reach the objective? - What are the lessons learnt and how can this knowledge be used for future plans or projects? What did you learn from the practices and approaches implemented? Which methods worked well, which did not? Which were the best practices? Which were unsuccessful? Identification of these lessons should help with future planning and could contribute to organizational strengthening or institutional learning. Best practices can be used again and unsuccessful ones eliminated. Internal evaluation is often improvement-oriented. The practice of evaluating ones own effort is a natural one: women will look to see if spots have been removed from shirts after washing, a mechanic will check if the motor he repaired is working properly, a carpenter will run his hands over the wood to decide when a piece is smooth. If not, they might need to change their approach, tool or means. 3.2 Participatory evaluation Participatory evaluation is getting more and more attention, but what does it mean? According to the writers of the Participatory Impact Assessment (see above), it is a process through which all the people involved at various levels of a project, engage in ongoing evaluation of the project and its effects. The focus of participatory evaluation is actively to engage those who the project is designed for, in all aspects of the evaluation process - sharing control in planning, undertaking, analysing and applying learning from an evaluation process. The guide mentions a number of aims of participatory evaluation: - The first and most important aim is to develop and improve a project through learning lessons all the time and using the lessons to adapt the project according to its specific context; - To build skills and knowledge that empower sustainable action in the future; - To communicate with external and internal stakeholders; - To provide a method of accountability for the project.

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MANAGING THE PROJECT CYCLE

The participatory evaluation works from both the improvement-oriented and the accountability perspective. Some of the key principles, or advantages, of participatory evaluation, as mentioned in the guide, are as follows: It ensures the involvement of active participants, not just sources of information; It builds the capacity of local people to gather information, analyse, reflect and take effective action; It supports the joint learning of people involved in a project, including those who are involved at different levels and in different ways; It acts as a catalyst to help people commit to taking more effective action in a project or community.

4. The adaptation phase

In the adaptation phase, the project or programme is adapted based on the outcomes of the monitoring and evaluation. Feeding lessons learnt back into the planning. During Monitoring and Evaluation, information is collected that can improve projects or programmes. These activities are part of the continuous process of re-evaluating the needs and the appropriateness of responses to the situation and desired changes. Accurate monitoring results can be fed into the evaluation process. After the evaluation, the NGO can identify best practices and lessons learnt. So the whole process of planning and assessing can start again. Usually an evaluation will provide clear recommendations concerning changes for the what and the how. The aim is to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and impact of the project or programme.

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